Random thoughts, musings, and tech stuff

20 Sep 2013, 14:50

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A different kind of app

The Play Store is an interesting thing, it’s incredibly cheap to have a developer’s account (or two, whoops), there’s no review process to get your app approved in the store, so you could literally get something written, published and delivered within a few hours, if you were motivated to do so. Well, I’ve had this idea for a couple of months now, that I wanted to try out, sort of an experiment, I wanted to make an app for my wife that would take the place of a greeting card. So, I did!

It would be much more personal than a greeting card, since I’d be writing it for her, but it also felt a bit different. One thing about us is that we live across the country from our families. Whenever we’re together and there’s a birthday, or celebration where greeting cards are exchanged, they are usually passed around for everyone to look at. That’s much harder to do when you live ~2,500 miles away. We tend to do our sharing with family on Facebook, greeting cards don’t usually make the cut.

A couple of times, for anniversaries or birthdays, I’ve made greeting cards for her by hand, but this feels a bit different from that too. There’s a lot you can do with the tools that you have at your disposal these days. Sometimes, using them to put a smile on your wife’s face is the best thing that you can spend a couple of hours doing.

I wonder if, in the coming years, we’ll start seeing more of these types of apps pop up. I don’t think that I’ve seen any previously, though I’m sure that this is not a unique idea. I’m curious to know who else has done a project like this, published something that was more experimental than most other apps, or doesn’t really fit into the typical notions of what an app should be.